This paper considers the role of flexicurity when jobs must be reallocated from a declining, traditional sector to a skill intensive expanding sector. Workers initially decide whether to acquire qualifications for skill-intensive tasks or to accept a less demanding traditional job. Unemployment...

The specificities of the workforce with a migrant background are often neglected in studies of retirement. Similarly, many studies of migration's impact on pensions often focus on aggregate outcomes - system sustainability or distributive characteristics. The present paper provides a fresh look...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. Our key insight is that linking benefits to past earnings (less redistributiveness) reduces the efficiency cost of social security (due to endogenous...

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the nonpecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...

Even when labour mobility is low, international integration affectslabour markets by making jobs more mobile. This runs via product market integration, which is an essential element of European integration. Increasing job mobility aects the possibilities single countries perceive in pursuing...

Using cross-country time series panel regressions for the last two decades, this paper seeks to identify the main policy and institutional factors that explain the share of self-employment across European countries. It looks at the aggregate share of self-employed as well as its breakdown by...

Globalization may impose a double-burden on low-skilled workers. On the one hand, the relative supply of low-skilled labor increases. This suppresses wages of low-skilled workers and/or increases their unemployment rates. On the other hand, low-skilled workers typically face more limited access...

In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work and labour market participation amongst prime-aged Germans. We show that unemployment fell because the Hartz reforms induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers....